With a roll of the dice and shouts of 'yalla', Jews and Arabs face off

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - In the early evening on a backstreet in downtown Jerusalem, Arabs and Jews are milling around, preparing for battle. But this isn't a new round of Middle East violence, it's a showdown over shesh besh, the local name for backgammon.

The gathering is the latest in a series of events organized by Double Yerushalmi, a group trying to build closer ties between Arabs and Jews through cultural activities like singing, dancing and the increasingly popular shesh besh championship.

To the strains of Arabic Dabke music - not usually heard in the western, mainly Jewish side of Jerusalem - around 50 players turned up on Monday, sitting hunched over the backgammon tables, shaking dice and clicking the counters like pros.

Cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air, beers and energy drinks were consumed and shouts of "yalla" and "kadima" - Arabic and Hebrew for "come on" - rang out. Tables were bashed.

"You want to win, but it's friendly too," said Karem Joubran, a 27-year-old from Shuafat camp, a Palestinian refugee neighborhood in north Jerusalem, who had to cross checkpoints to get to the event. "It's good, it brings people together."

Joubran said he usually speaks Hebrew to his Jewish opponents, but sometimes comes across a Jewish player who speaks decent Arabic and they chat and joke. They tend to avoid politics or the intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - their common ground is backgammon.

"FROM THE GROUND UP"

Zaki Djemal, an Israeli of Syrian Jewish descent, is one of the organizers of the gathering, which has met six times in recent months - half in Arab neighborhoods, half in Jewish ones - and has seen its popularity grow steadily.

"The city is segregated in many ways, so we wanted to create some crossover between neighborhoods," he said. "Politics is not at the center of this, but it's around."

With a history that some trace back 5,000 years to the ancient Iraqi city of Ur, backgammon is a mainstay in the Middle East, the clatter of the counters ringing out in the souks of Cairo, Istanbul, Casablanca and Damascus for centuries.

Jerusalem has also long been a center for the game and Djemal is hoping to reinforce that by organizing a Mediterranean championship later this year, with players coming from Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and across Europe.

On Monday evening a group of Palestinian women in hijab came to cheer on husbands and friends, while their children played backgammon at a nearby table. Across the cobbled alleyway, Orthodox Jewish locals listened, fascinated, to the Dabke music.